 The Super Man and the Bugout
Download the plain text version from Cory_Doctorow_-_The_Super_Man_and_Bugout.txt. Paste in links to your own versions below. 13 Responses to “The Super Man and the Bugout”Leave a Reply
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As knowledgeable about computers as he is about flea markets, Doctorow uses science fiction as a kind of cultural WD-40, loosening hinges and dissolving adhesions to peer into some of society’s unlighted corners. His best known story, ”Craphound,” tells of a competitive friendship between two junk collectors, one human and one alien; what it says about the uses of the past is no more mysterious than the prices paid for a vintage Coke bottle or an early Barbie doll. Not every attempt to wrest truth from cliche works — but you won’t want to miss Doctorow’s satiric glance at co-opted dissent among the grade-school set or the insidious horror of his updated Pinocchio tale.
[Read more quotes about the book] [Introduction by Bruce Sterling] [FAQ] [Get a signed copy shipped to your door]  ISBN: 1568582862 |
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Here’s this story’s intro from the book:
I was a Red-Diaper Baby. My parents were and are Trotskyists, and I grew up in “The Movement.” When they told me, at the age of five, that I was going to march in my aunt’s wedding I reportedly leapt to my feet and started picketing the living-room, carrying an imaginary placard, chanting “Not the Church and not the State/Women must control their fate!”
Movement politics–the intersection of a commitment to justice and all the human follies of power-hunger, avarice, jealousy and pride–are a fascinating source of personal drama and tension.
I started out wanting to write a story about a Jewish Super Man, someone truer to Supe’s roots. Siegel and Shuster, Superman’s creators, were both Jewish, both from Toronto. I started noodling with the idea of the Super Man being raised in the Gaza Strip, the Jewish stretch of Bathurst Street in Toronto where my father and mother were raised.
I found myself wondering about a Super Man raised in the Canadian tradition of “Peace, Order and Good Government” instead of “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,” and came around to a kind of leftie Super Man, a Canadian Super Man, balanced on the see-saw of Judiac guilt and intellectualism and the invincibility of a Super Man.
A Super Man is tough to write about. He’s immortal, he’s impervious, he’s nigh-omnipotent. How do you create dramatic tension about such a person? What danger can he be in? The Super Man cries out for a more-powerful being to pour the heat on. Who better to out-super the Super Man than the Bugouts?
PDF
The PDF above is very, very simple and not much different to the original text version (no conversion of quotes, emphasis, etc.). All I’ve done is change the typeface to 12 point Helvetica.
The width is still fixed at 80 characters.
I’m sure somebody else will put together some more sophisticated PDFs. This was just a quick fix done using the “Save as pdf” print option under OS X.
I’ve converted all the available stories into Palm Reader format, suitable for one-click loading onto a Palm Pilot or Pocket PC (as well as looking rather nice using the Palm Reader for Windows and Macs.)
The Palm Reader file’s available from here.
Apple Newton Paperback format of all of the short stories:
http://toronto.unna.org/unna/books/Fiction_Poetry/Cory_Doctorow/
Here are .pdf and .doc formats.
I’ve got another Palm Reader version of this story, available here.
Plucker is an open source compressed HTML format for Palm and
other handheld computers. The reader is available from
http://www.plkr.org/
and the converted story is at
http://home.austin.rr.com/rcp/plucker/Cory_Doctorow_-_The_Super_Man_and_Bugout.pdb
HTML versions of all stories can be found here. Converted with txt2html. The width is not fixed to 80 characters.
http://www.freazer.com/perso/julio/schoolgirl/index.html disrobeperformersstrokes
Excuse, Grant Henninger, but there 404, or it only at me?
I have the same problem… for all of Grant’s links.
I converted this to mobipocket’s prc format, that can be used in many readers, including the Amazon Kindle.
The_Super_Man_and_Bugout